From Funny Features to Entertaining Effects: Connecting Approaches to Communication Research on Political Comedy

AbstractThis article offers points of intersection and difference across communication research on political comedy. Based on our findings, we argue that political comedy scholarship can be usefully divided into two areas: (1) features and (2) effects. Under features, we find three overlapping but distinct areas of emphasis: political comedy's rhetorical devices and conventions, its ideological and ethical functions, and its contributions to public culture. Under effects, we construct another four areas, including knowledge and learning, attitudes and opinion, cynicism and engagement, and processing, understanding, and affinity. The essay provides an overview of studies on political comedy's features and effects, before concluding with five pathways that can bridge these divides and bring conceptual clarity to future research.Keywords: Political ComedyHumorEffectsFeaturesPublic Culture Notes[1] See Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr, Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).[2] For starters, Holcomb's masterful overview of the importance of "jesting" as rhetoric in early modern England accounted for the complex sociopolitical purposes put into play by joking under changing (and changeable) circumstances—demonstrating in particular how issues of culture and identity raised in humorous forms are anything but trivial. Chris Holcomb. Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). The Classics have also played a vital role in (re)constructing comedy's political functions. Responding to charges that ancient comedy only functioned as entertainment, Konstan parsed differences between Greek forms like Old Comedy, where "bold actions; earthy humor; immediate social or political relevance … rich in fantasy and spunk" contrasted with the "naturalism" and "subtle and sympathetic examination[s] of social issues" in New Comedy—highlighting that both forms were "an intervention in the ideological life of the classical city-state." David Konstan, Greek Comedy and Ideology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4–5, 11. For a more comprehensive look at the historical, literary, and popular "significant reoccurring patterns" of comedy, see T.G.A. Nelson, Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 17. 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